Views on the News

Views on the News*

July 12, 2014

The administration and the Democrat-media complex would have us
believe that all the scandals truly just
so happened, and happened to occur when it did, as a matter ofcoincidence, and not craftsmanship.
An opposing view suggests that the
stuff itself, as well as the timing of the disclosure of it, was manufactured
or contrived.An event
without a convenient angle (but not necessarily an inconvenient outcome for the
administration’s agenda) would become part of a Friday news dump. At
either end of possible truth of this view, the complex still spun and held its
collective nose when any odors of inconvenient facts or extraordinarily
convenient timing wafted by. The
failure of an event to pass the smell test is what makes a charge of “conspiracy theory” ring true. The unusual nature, complexity,
remarkable timing, volume and constant flow of “stuff” have combined to become a sort of defensive wall for the
Obama administration. Jonah
Goldberg recentlyremarked, “…basically the only way this White House can get out
from under one scandal or controversy is by getting crushed by another?”That cycle -- scandal, outrage,
subsequent rejection as “phony,” followed by another scandal has
conveniently appeared throughout the Obama presidency. Pick any scandal
and watch it run through the wash: Lather. Rinse.
Repeat.Scandal
exhaustion seems to be a part of the left’s “Cloward-Piven attempt to overwhelm opponents.With so many
scandals out there, no single outrage can generate concerted, sufficiently
visible opposition.”When President
Obama decides to replace one scandal with another, the media loses interest,
and two years later, we still don’t have answers to the simplest questions.The
scandal-a-month program certainly appears to be working to the benefit of the
Democrats.The fact remains that
even one of the scandals, if shown in full but as fiction, would produce a
screenplay too complicated to be remotely understandable, certainly not
entertaining, much less believable.Add all
the scandals together, and the story would never make enough sense to be
considered acceptable fiction.While the Constitution, the economy and our national
security crash and burn all around Obama’s stage, the teleprompter
continues to scroll, the show goes on, and the media complex applauds.With the
Democrat-media complex in control, the
truth of Obama’s stage may never be fully revealed, but redemption awaits in the wings.

If you are a
patriotic American, you believe that there
are circumstances under which it is right to take up arms against your own
government. The fact remains
that the rationale for the existence of the nation known as the United States
of America, which first appeared in print 238 years ago today, is entirely dependent
on the premise that there are indeed times “…when
in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve
the political bands which have connected them with another…”
and that such times may require the first group of people to “…mutually pledge to each other
[their] Lives, [their] Fortunes and [their] sacred Honor.”Dissolving those political bands with
another people, the newly liberated people (“…and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy
War…”) may, among other things, protect themselves from a
tyrannical power which engages in “…a
long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object
[which] evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism…”This is the argument presented to the world by Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin.It was adopted and approved by
the Continental Congress. No governmental official can deny the right of the people to
dissolve the political bands which tie them to a tyrannical government, without
at the same time denying the Declaration and, by extension, the Constitution on
which his own power is based. There are certain
ideas which are self-evidently true. One of those ideas is that we are created
without legal primacy or inferiority with regard to one another. Another idea, which is just obviously
true to people whose rational faculties are operating properly, is that the
rights to life and liberty and the pursuit of a prosperous life (which is what
the word ‘happiness’
meant in 1776) are not alienable, that is they cannot have a lien placed on
them by any other persons, not even representatives of the state.Not only is government denied the authority to put a lien on and
repossess those rights, but it is further required to protect those rights. Not only is it necessary for government
to protect these rights, but its use of power to do so is still only just if it
also involves the consent of the people whose freedom and property are
being protected.The TEA Party
movement suggests that we are bumping up against the limits of legitimacy.238 years ago the principles of the
Declaration found that the central government had lost the right to rule and
called on the people to withdraw allegiance to it.The most ardent believer in the American experiment has to
acknowledge that the verdict of history is that no state remains committed to
liberty forever, which means that such a
time will come again, and the real question is whether we are there now!

We all should
celebrate how, a century after the Civil War, moral leaders such as Martin Luther KingJr.
persuaded Congress that it was wrong to treat people differently based on their
skin color. Sadly,
the country has lost sight of much of the reason the Civil Rights Act was
supported by overwhelming bipartisan majorities in Congress (more than 80% of
Republicans and 67% of Democrats). People all across the political spectrum
believed the promise of the new law, which was to replace segregation with a
color-blind society, or something as close to it as we could get. In
King’s famous words, people would “not be judged by the color of
their skin but by the content of their character.”Opponents of the Civil Rights Act warned that
it might serve as a vehicle for racial quotas and reverse discrimination. In the years since then, many
civil-rights advocates have continued to shift their goals away from the ideal
of a color-blind society. The
new problem is that race is increasingly trumping character when it comes to
federal law.Federal
laws written in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Act required the
demonstration of intentional discrimination in matters such as hiring, housing,
contracting, and admission policies before action was warranted. Now the Obama Administration claims that
enforcement of civil-rights law can be based on statistical evidence that
supposedly shows a “disparate
impact” on certain minority groups.Democrats have adopted a program of
color-conscious solutions that focus on affirmative action and wealth
redistribution. The
country has never fully accepted the racial-entitlement revisionism that
leftists have imposed on civil-rights issues.Americans support equal opportunity and outreach but still hold up the
goal of a color-blind society. There
are sound reasons that so many Americans resist a regime of racial
entitlements.Schools
now put a race-conscious fist on the admissions scale and clearly admit
students based on race.Affirmative-action students are 75% more likely to drop out of science
programs than are regular admits. At law schools, they are two or three times
more likely to fail the bar exam, but students who attend a school where their
entry credentials are similar to those of their fellow students are more likely
to finish and fulfill their work and life ambitions. We now have fewer black
doctors, lawyers, and business chiefs than we would have had under race-neutral
admissions policies.The
conclusion is that racial-preference policies have lulled substantial segments
of the black middle class into complacency and half-hearted performance in our
increasingly education-focused world, and that
isn’t the outcome that supporters of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 hoped
for or promised.

President Obama is treating the border crisis, more than 50,000 unaccompanied children crossing
illegally, as a public relations problem and is “not letting this crisis go to
waste.” These kids are being flown or bused to family members around the
country and told to then show up for deportation hearings. These illegal aliens then do not show up,
since they are receiving superior schooling, superior health care, superior
everything, so as a result, only 3% are being repatriated, to cite an internal
Border Patrol memo.Immediate deportation is exactly what happens to illegal
immigrants, children or otherwise, from Mexico and Canada. There is a quirk of the law, a 2008 law
intended to deter sex trafficking, that mandates that Central American kids
receive temporary relocation, extensive assistance and elaborate immigration/deportation
proceedings, which many simply evade, which was designed for a small number of
sex-trafficked youth, and has been used to justify treating them differently
than other illegal aliens. Stopping this wave is not complicated. A serious President would
go to Congress tomorrow proposing a change in the law, simply mandating that
Central American kids get the same treatment as
Mexican kids, i.e., be subject to immediate repatriation.When the first convoys begin rolling from
town to town across Central America, the influx will stop.Yet this wave of children has doubled
in size in the past two years and is projected to double again by October. The new variable is Obama's unilateral
(and lawless) June 2012 order essentially legalizing hundreds of thousands of
illegal immigrants who came here as children.Message received in Central America. A comprehensive law would not have
prevented the current influx. Indeed, any change that amnesties 11 million illegals simply reinforces the message that if you come
here illegally, eventually you will be allowed to stay.Completing the border fence is for the long
term. For the immediate crisis, the answer is equally, blindingly clear: Eliminate the Central American exception
and enforce the law, and it must happen soon or the nightmare will continue
until it does.

It's no
accident that ObamaCare has become emblematic of the Obama
administration overall, because it exemplifies so thoroughly what Obama
represents ideologically and functionally.ObamaCare symbolizes government largesse, incompetence, inefficiency,
arrogance and heartlessness, a government that knows better than you what is
good for you.It epitomizes
staggering spending, waste and debt. It typifies a government that has grown
too big, crushing your liberties while telling you that it has your best
interests at heart and that you can't live without it. It stands for wholesale dishonesty,
something that is entirely different from what it pretends to be and what we
were told it would be.President Obama has
come to personify these very traits, so it is only fitting that ObamaCare has fixed itself to him as he fixed himself to
it.He personally represents government
largesse, incompetence, arrogance, someone who knows better than you do what is
good for you, someone who recklessly spends the nation's resources with no
apparent concern for citizens' will or their financial well-being, a man who is
subordinating (and thus destroying) our freedoms to his ideology, and someone
who is fundamentally dishonest with the American people. Through his arbitrary and capricious implementation of ObamaCare, he is also showing us his singular propensity
for lawlessness.As ObamaCare goes, so goes Obama, and lately the verdicts on ObamaCare have been horrendous. It's no accident that
Obama's approval ratings are in the toilet right along with his "signature
achievement."Nothing good is
coming from this miserable ObamaCare law, except
perhaps that it is accelerating people's
learning curve about Obama's true intentions and his underlying character.

President Barack Obama again sought to
make the case to the American people for
“dealing with the rapidly growing threat of climate change.”Right up front Obama said that his speech would not have “a lot of spin, just the facts,” but
when a politician says that, you know to expect the opposite.Most skeptics have very sound reasons
for their opposition:

·First, the exact
extent to which man-made carbon dioxide emissions, which
are only a small portion of total emissions, affect the climate is uncertain. Advocates have damaged their
credibility significantly by making extreme predictions of rapidly accelerating
warming and more frequent, more intense natural disasters, predictions that
have not been supported by real-world experience.

·Second, the cost of
implementing meaningful constraints on greenhouse-gas emissions (GHGs) would be
enormous. A recent Heritage Foundation analysis of
the administration’s war on coal projects that the onslaught of
regulations would cost America 600,000 jobs and more than $1,200 per year in
income for a family of four.

·Third, U.S. action
alone would be ineffective. International negotiations have centered
on placing the economic burden of addressing climate change on a few dozen
developed countries while asking little or nothing from more than 150
developing countries.The primary
source of greenhouse-gas emissions is increasingly the developing world. Unless and until this issue is resolved,
the U.S. would be foolish to consider unilateral restrictions on the U.S.
economy that would be merely symbolic.

Congress has justifiable reasons to question the President’s
call for unilateral U.S. action on climate change.Moreover, contrary to the President’s
claims, polls indicate that people tend to agree with Congress that climate
change is not a high priority.It is not Congress that is out of step with the American public or
even global opinion, but President Obama
and the global elites who are leading the charge on climate change that the
public does not want.

* There is so much published each
week that unless you search for it, you will miss important breaking news.I try to package the best of this
information into my “Views
on the News” each Saturday morning.Updates have been made this week to the
following issue sections: